Texas law makes being gay a crime

By JAN JARBOE RUSSELL, SYNDICATED COLUMNIST

Published
10:00 pm PST, Thursday, December 5, 2002

Here in Texas things are running about normal on the sex and politics front.

The day after the U.S. Supreme Court said it would review a Texas case that makes it illegal for homosexuals to have sex, our governor, Rick Perry, decreed that the state's 28-year-old law against "deviate sexual intercourse with another individual of the same sex" is, in Perry's words, perfectly "appropriate."

By that, Perry, a long, tall, boot-wearing Texan with a great head of hair that is the envy of Texans of all genders, did not mean that homosexual sex is appropriate.

On the contrary, Perry meant that our law -- officially and ambitiously titled as the Texas Homosexual Conduct Law -- is appropriate as it stands on our books.

Under this law, if two men or two women are caught having private oral or anal sex, they can be arrested, jailed and fined $200 for deviant sexual intercourse.

Frankly, my dears, that might be much more detail than you want to know about what goes on in private between adults of any persuasion.

Well, too bad. Just when you thought life could not possibly get any weirder, the Supremes are going to investigate whether the millions of homosexuals in America are in fact no-good, dirty, rotten lawbreakers and should be treated to the Lone Star version of the sexual gulag. Trust me: No details will be spared in the ensuing debate.

Already we have been treated to more than I personally wanted to know about the sexual life of a Houston couple named John Lawrence and Tyron Garner, whose case has now landed in the lap of the Supremes.

In 1998, Harris County sheriff's deputies were called to the couple's apartment by reports that an armed person inside was "going crazy." That turned out to be untrue. Instead, when deputies arrived at the apartment, imagine their surprise when they found Lawrence and Garner having sex.

The two were arrested, spent a night in jail, paid the $200 fine and quickly filed a lawsuit, which will now be settled by the Supremes. With any luck at all, the Supremes will decide that state bans on homosexual sex are not just silly but unconstitutional.

This is one of those cases where you would think conservatives and liberals could get together, rise up and agree that what happens between consenting adults in their own bedrooms is their own damn business.

After all, Texas is not the only state with these kinds of crazy laws. Nine states have laws worse than Texas'.

In Texas, it's only the conduct of homosexuals we are hopelessly trying to regulate. In Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Idaho and Utah, sodomy is a crime for heterosexuals as well as homosexuals.

Sodomy is generally defined as oral or anal sex. I don't want to even think about how many heterosexuals in those nine states might be in occasional violation of this particular law.

Conservatives ought to hope the Supremes rule that the Texas law is unconstitutional strictly on this basic issue of invasion of privacy. What kind of self-respecting conservative wants the government in his or her bedroom or anyone else's bedroom?

Liberals ought to hope for the same outcome, because the Texas law discriminates against gay men and women, pure and simple. It brands homosexuals as criminals.

That's not only unfair, it's downright impractical. Despite its title, the Texas Homosexual Conduct Law doesn't appear to have restrained anyone's conduct. According to the latest census, there are more than 600,000 households of same-sex partners in the United States, and about 43,000 of those are in Texas.

This is one of those laws that just gives people something to rebel against.

Nonetheless, Perry is for it, and the governor before him -- President George Bush -- also supported the law. Part of the governor's job is to defend our Texas way of life, and -- politically speaking -- that means playing to the macho crowd.

The Supremes have a different job description. Among other things, they get paid to defend constitutional guarantees of privacy and equal protection under the law. Let's hope they do it.